


Second Best

by 401



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bisexual Bucky Barnes, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Body Image, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Eventual Smut, Jealousy, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Oral Sex, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-11
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 04:51:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5403749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/401/pseuds/401
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky is convinced that Steve no longer has feelings for him. He could not be more wrong.</p><p> </p><p>Part of a series of one shots detailing Bucky Barnes' return to the 21st century</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bigger

 

“Do you think that your reaction was reasonable, befitting the situation, Sergeant Barnes?”

Bucky drummed his fingers anxiously on the arm of the armchair he was sitting in. It felt odd not doing it on both sides; unbalanced and unnatural. SHIELD had taken his arm (they did it every therapy session), disconnected one of the many sliding disks of metal in a way that he had not even know to be possible. Bucky had thought immediately that if he had really wanted to break the petite female therapist’s neck he could do so with or without the arm, but he had chosen not to share the musing. The man named Stark had scanned his arm to find it out how to remove it. They said it was ‘for his own safety’, but he had called that bullshit fairly quickly. Initially, Bucky had been apathetic, allowing them to do as they pleased.

_“Stay still Sergeant Barnes, the procedure’s nearly over.”_

Bucky’s mind had been pulled back to the Hydra bunker and back again too fast to function. Chairs had been thrown, walls had been punched. Bucky had felt a prick in his shoulder and the world had gone black before any more damage could be done.

“Sergeant Barnes,” The therapist crossed her legs and shifted her weight.

Frustration danced at the corner of her painted lips for a fraction of a second and Bucky flinched, bracing himself for punishment before he remembered; that does not happen here.

“I can’t do my job as a therapist if you do not do your job as a patient,” The doctor insisted softly, “You need to help me, help you.”

Bucky nodded and took a slow inhalation of hospital-scented air before looking up at the therapist. His first thought is of how much she looked like Peggy Carter. His second thought was if that was why Steve had chosen her for him. The thought made an unwelcome bubble of envy rise in Bucky’s throat. He swallowed it and busied his mind with his words.

“I should have dealt with it better,” Bucky admitted, his voice much smaller than he anticipated, “I panicked.”

Dr Honeywell smiled encouragingly, jotting down Bucky’s words (the first words he’d spoken since they’d met two weeks ago) before gesturing him to continue.

“It reminded me of the Procedure Cell,” Bucky continued obediently, “Where they took me when I first lost…”

Bucky’s voice got so small that he discarded it, letting it fall silent against the heartbeat of the room. The clock ticking, the movement of Dr Honeywell’s skirt against the fake leather seats, they were all so much bigger than Bucky’s voice; he let them take over.

“Lost what, Sergeant?” Dr Honeywell leaned forwards. Bucky sensed that she meant it to be comforting, but it was exactly the opposite.

“When I lost Steve,” Bucky muttered, “Captain Rogers.”

Dr Honeywell nodded and flipped to a new page in her notebook.

“Tell me more about your feelings surrounding Captain Rogers,” she underlined something on the page with a noisy scrape of the pen. Bucky’s skin crawled, “I sense he is someone you feel quite safe around.”

Bucky nodded silently and rubbed his hand absently over the metal bracket that was all that was left of his arm, like a large, titanium plug socket. Bucky could feel the doctor’s eyes ploughing into him; time to speak.

“I trust him,” Bucky explained quietly, “He can calm me down, he always did…before the war I mean.”

Honeywell jotted more as Bucky spoke.

“Before the war, you lived with Captain Rogers, Steve, am I right?” She leaned back in the chair, putting Bucky at ease.

“Yeah, it was swell,” Bucky smiled at the memory, “I miss that.”

Dr Honeywell smiled along with Bucky, it seemed genuine too.

“You say you miss it, but you live with Captain Rogers now. Do you feel your dynamic is somehow altered, or less ideal after all that has happened to… to well, both of you actually?”

Bucky frowned and nodded, clenching his remaining hand into a comfortingly tight fist against his knee. His heart picked up speed.

“He doesn’t see me the same way,” Bucky half-whispered, his throat drying out uncomfortably.

Dr Honeywell narrowed her eyes and took more notes.

“How so?” she asked, tilting her head so that her thick hair slid off of her shoulder and hit the arm of the chair with a heavier than expected thud. Bucky stopped himself staring.

His chest tightened and his heart quickened further, followed shortly by his breathing.

“Can I go?” Bucky asked shortly, “I want to go home.”

Dr Honeywell smiled and frowned at the same time. It made Bucky uneasy.

“Did that question I just asked make you uncomfortable, Sergeant?”

Bucky nodded quickly as he left the small room and paced slightly lopsidedly to Steve’s car in the parking lot. He opened the door and got it, unspeaking and relieved.

“How did it go?” The captain asked him, a warm smile spreading over his face in a way that made Bucky’s stomach knot up.

“I want my arm back.”

 


	2. Just as Much

“You’re quiet,” Steve pointed out to the side of Bucky’s vacant looking face.

_He’s always quiet, Rogers. Don’t hover,_ Steve thought to himself, instantly regretting his words when Bucky winced slightly at the intrusion and sudden speech.

 

“You don’t have to talk about the session if you don’t want to,” Steve corrected himself, focusing his own eyes on the road so they did not meet the brunet’s unnecessarily.

 

“But I’m if you want me, you know, to talk…” Steve let his voice trail into an awkward silence that was punctuated and highlighted by the quiet purr of the car’s motor underneath them.

 

Bucky stared off, out of the window at the DC skyline that was blurring and thrumming like the pulse of an engine past his window. The vibrant colours and the smell of rain hitting his face from the rolled down window did nothing to calm him. It usually helped; Steve had driven him around the city about ten times one night to get him to sleep. When the Captain had pulled him into an awkward bridal carry to get him back into the apartment they shared, he had woken up, so they had gotten back into the car and driven until sunrise.

 

Now, everything about the city just reminded Bucky of his own thoughts and worries. Every billboard and streetlamp had some tenuous but painful link to Steve, Peggy and the War. It ached in Bucky’s head like a fever, pressing the backs of his eyes.

“Do you still love her?” Bucky blurted out, releasing the pressure, “Agent Carter, Peggy.”  


Steve raised his eyebrows in surprise at the topic of conversation. It was good though, Bucky was speaking and that was enough. He thought, formulating an answer out of the snippets of feelings that even he had not sorted through in full yet. It was an odd sort of love, more of a nostalgia and longing than a love, but he figured that yes, he did love Peggy. If not he at least loved the memory of her, what they could have been if he had not been frozen.

 

“Yes,” Steve answered, sighing deeply in a way that tightened his voice and made him look sad. Bucky hated it when he did that.

 

“Yeah, I still love Pegs,” Steve turned to Bucky and smiled softly, “I’m not sure what kind of love, but there’s certainly love there.”

Bucky nodded, swallowing the ache in his throat and stopping his eyes watering with a tightly clenched jaw. He knew he had no right to hurt this badly. He had missed seventy years of Steve’s life, there was no reason that he shouldn’t be second best to Peggy. She was the last person to make Steve happy, to make him feel good. He was not going to match that.

 

She was beautiful too, from what Bucky remembered. All shiny hair and colourful lips that even left some dames transfixed. Bucky reckoned that he could not match that side of Peggy either. Scars littered his body like tally marks on a cell wall, counting down the days until he could finally be let out of the prison Hydra had made his body into. It was not a body to love or pleasure – it was a machine to be controlled.

 

“Buck?” Steve watched as the all too familiar stretch of sadness hit Bucky’s face, “You alright?”

 

Bucky nodded and turned to the window, desperately absorbing the throbbing scene with rapidly reddening eyes.

 

“We’ll get the arm back, pal,” Steve comforted, “Is that why your all hurt looking?”

 

Bucky paused and decided that no answer was probably his only way out of the wall he was being backed into.

 

“It’s not the arm,” Steve realised quietly, pulling into their apartment and switching the engine into silence.

 

“Help me out, Bucky,” Steve sat back, putting a hand on Bucky’s knee where he would usually squeeze the metal hand, a non-verbal ‘I’m not scared of you’.

 

Bucky took a long, shaky breath that did nothing to soothe the aching in his lungs.

 

“I still love you,” Bucky whispered, “As much as you love Peggy.”  


 


	3. First

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last Chapter folks

The Captain was silent as they walked into the house. Bucky was unsure if this was a comfort or not, but when Steve sat down on the couch, a smile spread over the blonde’s face that Bucky had not seen for a while. Warmth spread through Bucky like an infection, from one soldier to the other.

“You… you love me,” Steve raked his hand over his face and the smile morphed into serious thoughtfulness.

 

Bucky nodded and sat slowly next to Steve, being careful that their bodies did not touch.

“I always have,” Bucky admitted, “It wasn’t something we could speak about back then, all the-

 

“Queer-bashing,” Steve finished the sentence for Bucky, frowning knowingly at the uncomfortable memory of having his face mashed into the dirt for being a ‘fairy’.

 

Bucky smiled sympathetically, putting his clumsier and less dominant right hand on Steve’s thigh and rubbing slowly, sensing the new unhappiness that had grown in the Captain, lost in old memories and staring at his feet.

 

Steve suffered the homophobia much more than Bucky. It was because Steve did not care. If it came to it, he said that he could love ‘whoever the hell he god-damned pleased’ and I earned him some real abuse at the hands of some of the surlier guys on their block. Bucky kept quieter, much quieter, almost exclusively dating girls and denying it to the death that he and Steve were an item (it was a rumour that reared its head every few months or so)

_“Nah, we’re just pals is all.”_

 

The feeling of denying feelings for Steve still sat like sour milk in his stomach.

“I didn’t think you felt that way about me back then,” Steve mumbled thoughtfully, putting his hand absently on top of Bucky’s and stroking the back of it rhythmically with his thumb.

“Buck, you were the biggest ladies’ man this side of…”  


Bucky closed his eyes and shook his head. He thought back to the nights where he would stare with burning eyes at the ceiling of some girls darkened bedroom and wonder where the hell he had gone wrong.

 

_“_ _Those queers will be the end of this country, I'll tell ya'.”_

 

His father’s voice drilled into the centre of his chest and made it tighten. The disappointment on his old man’s face was more that he could have dealt with back then, so he’d laughed along and saved his tears for his pillow.

 

Or Steve’s. He had cried to Steve many a time, always lying as to why he was so upset. He had thought that Steve had seen through it. Apparently not.

“It was always you, Steve,” Bucky sighed, watching as a little shock of happiness twitched at the corner of the Captain’s mouth.

Steve nodded, the smile growing into a reserved grin.

“And when I got with Peggy, you gave up hope,” Steve’s voice slowed as he put the pieces together in his head.

It explained so much. Steve had been desperate for Bucky to be as wild about Peggy as he was, but instead the Sergeant was quiet around her, shyer than Steve had ever seen him. Hell, Steve had even expected some low level flirting between the pair but there was nothing, just a new and unbefitting insecurity that he could not find a source for.

“God, I wish I’d known,” Steve furrowed his eyebrows and rubbed his eyes.

Bucky shrugged and let his shoulders fall unevenly back against the back of the couch.

“What difference would it have made, Stevie,” Bucky muttered, “You never felt that way about…”

Steve turned to Bucky sharply and cupped the soldier’s face in his hands. Bucky’s eyes widened slightly in shock so Steve loosened the grip.

“No, no that’s not true,” Steve shook his head hurriedly, “That’s not true. I loved you _every_ minute we were together in Brooklyn.”

Bucky looked at Steve for some reassurance and was met with a gentle-eyed nod. The soldier let his eyes sink again, closing them against the tension that was building up in his head. He rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“I guess…” Bucky’s voice was soft, but hoarse with emotion, “I guess I missed that one by a mile.”

Steve nodded and reached out slowly and cautiously, cupping the brunet’s face in one hand and shuffling himself forward with the other. He guided Bucky forward gently, holding his arm-less left side to keep him steady. The Captain stopped with his lips barely touching the soldier’s, his breath ghosting his mouth in hot, minty gusts that made Bucky’s head reel.

“Give me permission,” Steve ordered quietly, “I need to know you want this too.”

Bucky pushed forward, locking their lips so that his mutter of permission was rendered an indistinguishable groan of arousal against the Captain’s mouth. Steve ran his hand down Bucky’s spine, settling at the small of his back and pulling him carefully onto his lap, laying back on the couch so that Bucky was straddling his hips.

 

The pair’s lips did not disconnect once, but adapted, moving fluidly and seamlessly in a way that Bucky did not expect that he could maintain after so much loss of practice. They had never kissed, not like this but he and Steve had always had a sort of easy synchronisation that was hard to fake. Even the little movements, like catching thrown objects without needing to be told or finding the perfect position to sit in alongside each other comfortably were easy and instinctive. This was no different.

“Seventy years,” Steve mumbled hotly against Bucky’s neck, pulling his hips flush against his, “I can’t believe I’ve waited for this for seventy years.”

Bucky coughed a laugh, distracted by the stimulation and friction. Steve slid his fingers under the soldier’s t-shirt, lifting it up and over his head before ghosting his hands down his sides, letting his fingertips catch on the planes of muscle and revelling in the sight of goose bumps covering Bucky’s skin.

“Don’t look at it,” Bucky frowned uncomfortably, gesturing to the exposed metal socket of his disengaged arm with a tilt of his head.

Steve shushed him and took his lips to his stomach, covering it with kisses and letting his hands roam totally unfazed by the lack of symmetry.

Bucky’s arm had never bothered Steve, not aesthetically. The pain it caused him, all of the memories and muscle strain and pulling and friction, Steve hated it for that but the way it looked had never upset or disconcerted the Captain. He had Bucky back, and a little metal was not going to stop him enjoying it.

“Steve, I’m…” Bucky shivered against another well placed kiss, “Jesus, Steve.”

The blond chuckled and slid his thumbs into the waistband of Bucky’s jeans, unbuttoning them smoothly and shuffling them to his thighs before flipping him flat onto his back and kissing another trail down his chest. Steve kissed Bucky through his boxers, smiling against the thin fabric at the sound of a throaty moan from above him. The Captain persisted, pulling the boxer down to Bucky’s thighs with his jeans and taking him into his mouth.

“Cap…” Bucky’s voice peaked and trailed off.

The sound of his heartbeat filled his ears as the Captain’s head bobbed slowly and rhythmically, each stroke pulling him closer to an edge that he had not met for far too long. The heat of it curled in his stomach and tightened.

It had never felt like this in Brooklyn. Girls could get him a certain distance but left him feeling like he was missing something, like there was something untouched. The feeling he got with Steve was confusing and scary and wild, but complete. There was nothing ‘untouched’ about it.

“I’m close,” Bucky managed to moan out a warning through his haze of arousal, “Steve, I’m really clo…”

Bucky’s thighs trembled in Steve’s hands as he toppled headlong into climax. His vision fractured and greyed and nothing but the Captain’s name could leave his mouth.

Steve grinned and kissed his way back up Bucky’s chest, settling his lips against the soldier’s collar bone and holding him close.

Bucky was a lot of things to Steve. A friend, a lover, a guardian, a companion.

 

He was never second best.

 

 


End file.
